In Charlotte, this organization donates to defeat cancer and lets people swim to remember

It’s an evening off the coast of California. Katie Kalka is cutting through the water. It’s dark. Quiet. The Charlotte resident is safe on this balmy night in the summer of 2019, with her husband and a few friends serving as her crew as she swims from Catalina Island to the mainland . But there are no voices. All she can hear is her mind. And it’s racing.

Kalka is here for her father, Joe Lallande, who’s back home in Charlotte because he can’t travel in his advanced state of lung cancer. Like Kalka, Lallande was a competitive swimmer. He swam at Lehigh; she swam at Purdue . He would always bring up the name Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim across the English Channel , and would occasionally remind his daughter of Ederle’s feat. It was friendly ribbing, mostly. But also a nod of belief. Kalka hadn’t done something like that before this 2019 night, but cancer gave her a deadline, so here she is: in the final few years of her father’s life, beating against open-water waves and time’s unrelenting current.

“I did that in honor of my dad, and I just really dedicated that swim to him,” Kalka said, recalling that 2019 summer night — that snapshot of those 10 hours and 45 minutes on the Catalina Channel. “I kept him in my mind throughout that whole swim. Understanding that no matter how hard I might have been having it at any moment during that swim, he was taking on a battle and challenge of his own.

“He was in my mind for quite a bit of that swim.”

And this weekend, he’ll be there again.

On Sunday at Camp Thunderbird at Lake Wylie, hundreds of swimmers will embark on an annual charity swim put on by Swim Across America . The organization, headquartered in Charlotte, was founded in 1987 and has raised over $100 million in cancer research . That means clinical trials, patient programs and more. Swim Across America has charity swims across the country, each location having different numbers of participants and different levels of fundraising. Each adult swimmer must raise $400 to participate in the swim, but can raise as much as they’d like. Kalka, for instance, said she’s raised just over $1,000 for this year’s event — and other years she’s raised more.

It’s important to note, though, that all the money that is raised at an event stays in that community. What’s raised local, stays local.

According to the nonprofit organization’s website, SAA has raised $1.3 million for the Levine Cancer Institute in Charlotte since 2017.

“Everything in Baltimore stays there, everything at UNC stays there, everything in Charlotte stays here,” said Swim Across America CEO Rob Butcher, who estimated that just over 200 people will be at the swim this weekend. “… Swim Across America, it’s kind of one of the most impactful stories that most people don’t know.”

Swim Across America’s simple mission

Talk to anyone at Swim Across America, and they’ll tell you all about the weekends on the water, the inspiring stories that they see and hear and feel.

For the CEO, it’s personal, too.

Butcher, 52, grew up in Daytona Beach, Florida. He found swimming when he was a junior in high school and fell in love with it quickly. He considers swimming his earliest “life preserver,” a sport that provided not only an escape from a tough household with an abusive stepfather but also one that offered community and competition.

The rest of his adult life, as he tells it, always led back to the water. He went on to swim at Georgia Southern University. Stayed there for four years. After a brief break away from the pool as he pursued higher education, he moved home and trained alongside Ryan Lochte and made the USA Olympic Trials in 2000. He then spent the better part of the next two decades working at a variety of places before finding Swim Across America.

He quickly learned SAA’s story, which he can recite off the top of his head and can do so with aplomb.

Swim Across America truly began with a run in the summer of 1984. A man named Jeff Keith had lost his right leg to osteosarcoma , a type of bone cancer, when he was a teenager, and after college, he set out to run across the United States. Boston to Los Angeles. He finished in eight months. It was punctuated by a call from President Ronald Reagan and a total of $1 million in funds raised for the American Cancer Society .

After the run, one of Keith’s best friends, Matt Vossler, wanted to host another event to help raise money for cancer research. And fresh off the 1984 Olympics in the U.S. — which thrust swimming into the nation’s spotlight — he decided to put together a charity swim across the Long Island Sound. Olympians participated to raise the profile of the cause. The event steadily grew from there. The name was changed from Swim Across the Sound to Swim Across America in 1992, the same year it was incorporated as a 501(c)3 public charity. Today, SAA hosts charity swims in more than 20 communities across the country.

By the time Butcher heard of Swim Across America, in 2010, he was bought into its mission. Devoting time to an organization that mixes swimming and cancer research hit remarkably close to home. Particularly the cancer research part.

In early 2007, Butcher’s mother, Maria, was diagnosed with appendiceal cancer. Butcher stopped working during that time to be her full-time caregiver. And over the course of the next nine months, he saw his mother struggle with chemotherapy. He remembers how he had to put masking tape around her fingers so she could hold a pencil. He remembers her balance troubles. Her neuropathy. But he also remembers the beautiful closure that her diagnosis brought him. That her diagnosis brought them .

“Normally you don’t get one more breakfast, lunch, I love you,” Butcher said. “I had this window with my mom where we could have these conversations. Where we could have this finality.”

By Thanksgiving of 2007, she was gone. But she lived on — lives on — in what Butcher later did. He took a job as the executive director of U.S. Masters Swimming, a network and community for swimmers. While there, he partnered with Swim Across America and started volunteering at SAA events around 2010. In 2014, he joined the organization’s board of directors. In 2015, his predecessor, Janel McArdle, recommended him to be the CEO. And he took it.

Butcher started fast. Nine years later — through various breakthroughs and setbacks, through various trials and triumphs — he’s still paddling at the same pace.

‘That to me just means the world’

If you go to a Swim Across America charity swim, there’s plenty of joy. There are posters with encouraging messages for the swimmers. Swimmers, in turn, write the name of the person they’re swimming for on their backs and arms with waterproof markers.

In addition to the joy, there’s proof.

Doctors speak to the participants about what they’re working on. There are long lists of testimonials on the SAA website from doctors who couldn’t do their work without SAA. That same list shows the breakthroughs that such sustained SAA funding has yielded — in names of drugs and FDA approval dates, yes, but also more.

“I look at what Swim Across America does, and its mission to support doctors and support research that maybe wouldn’t come to light were it not for them, and it’s so amazing,” Kalka, the aforementioned participant, said. “That to me just means the world. And now I feel almost a debt of gratitude and an obligation to Swim Across America for the work that they do because of the gift that I got with my dad.”

That gift?

One of the drugs directly supported by SAA — Keytruda — is what lengthened the life of Kalka’s father. What was expected to be a four-month diagnosis turned into two years before he passed in 2021. He took a bucket-list trip to Rome in those two years. He connected with lifelong friends in those two years.

He saw his daughter reach a swimming milestone in those two years, too. He might not have been in the water that night in Catalina, but he was with her. Just like he’ll be with her in Charlotte. Just as he’ll always be, everywhere else.

How to support SAA

Support Swim Across America at its website . You can find ways to participate in this weekend’s swim, as well as donate to the cause.